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Happy New Year!
I think we can all agree, regardless of where we live, that 2022 was a tumultuous year. There was seemingly a new crisis every day. Totalitarian regimes moving against their populations became increasingly normal, from Iran to China. The ongoing rise (and occasional fall) of populist politics. The Russian invasion of Ukraine. The rise of energy and food costs and the impact on some of the world’s poorest. The attempted murder of Sir Salman Rushdie. And to be parochial just for a moment, complete political insanity in the UK.
I really hoped that 2023 would mark the end, or at least a pause, of that wonderful Chinese saying – we live in interesting times. Even for just a few months I had dreamed of a period of calm, of quiet, of dullness. Or at least a few weeks so we could all catch up on life and enjoy the world we live in, rather than being anxious at turning on the news.
It is only the sixth day of the year and my wish for calm has already been broken. This week we have seen political dysfunction in the USA; Belarus has commenced trials against many of their high-profile detainees who were arrested during the demonstrations against Lukashenka; there have been deadly riots in Mexico and the news is filled with the gloom of Covid (and China’s censoring of news on it), flu and inflation. It’s day six…
We knew that this year would see significant world events, as the impact of the war in Ukraine continues to be felt. But China is also likely to seek to exploit this global diplomatic distraction for their own nefarious wants. And of course the protests in Iran, Afghanistan, South Sudan and Mexico continue apace – even as they evolve.
Index will remain busy in the months ahead as we seek to shine a spotlight on the actions of totalitarian regimes and make sure that you hear from the people behind the headlines. From the women now banned from attending university in Afghanistan, from the democracy activists imprisoned in Belarus, from the Rohingya mothers held in camps as they flee Myanmar, from the journalists who fight to be heard and stay alive in Mexico. Index will keep providing a platform for the persecuted, so they can tell their stories and you can hear them.
Happy New Year in these interesting times.
The exhibition Seeing Auschwitz, which opened recently in South Kensington, London, focuses on the images which play a large part in our collective perception of the Holocaust. What makes the images in this exhibition unique is that they were predominantly taken by the perpetrators of the Holocaust.
A focus of the exhibition is to try and humanise these images. Blown up large, we are invited to study the small detail for any stories we can see. A farewell embrace, children laughing, a gaze up to the sky.
The pictures in the exhibition were taken over a three-month period in 1944. The clear, more polished photos taken by the Nazis are juxtaposed by a section of the exhibition which shows several snatched photos taken by the Sonderkommando (work units made up of death camp prisoners). One of the photos (it’s not known how they accessed a camera) shows a group of women being forced naked, a hurried snapshot of terror. Drawings made after the war by one of the Sonderkommando gives an insight into the horror of the gas chambers.
One interesting photo is taken by neither perpetrator nor victim. The image, taken by a 14-year-old boy from his bedroom window, shows inmates from Dachau on a death march through his village. It places the horrors of the concentration camp, very rarely, in a normal, suburban setting.
The exhibition reminds us that, with around two million visitors per year, Auschwitz itself isn’t the only place we can understand what happened there. It can also be ‘seen’ in the void - the absence of large Jewish populations, common in towns and cities throughout Europe before the Second World War, which signifies whole generations of people who will never be born.
Attempts to destroy evidence of the Holocaust by the Nazis failed overall. Aside from antisemitic and right-wing conspiracy theorists, the world is clear about what the Holocaust was, and who the perpetrators were.
Similar efforts to bear witness to atrocities continue today. In March 2022, at least 458 people were killed in and around the town of Bucha in Ukraine by the invading Russian Army, which Russia’s UN envoy denied and claimed was a ‘staged provocation’. Journalists and civilians alike collected evidence to prove that was a falsehood. Elsewhere it is not so easy. In a chilling echo of the Holocaust, around five years ago there were reports that China was building internment camps for its Uyghur population, a mainly Muslim ethnic minority living in the far north western region of the country. The Chinese Foreign Ministry publicly denied there was a genocide in 2021; reporters are rarely allowed into the region where the genocide is taking place and when they are, they are often followed and/or their press trips tightly controlled. Those who have left the region are subject to harassment and intimidation, as we reported in our Banned by Beijing report. Still, a growing network of brave individuals are speaking out, journalists are working hard to obtain information and a clear picture of what is taking place is emerging.
Like Sydney Silverman did in 1942, it’s important for organisations like Index on Censorship to pressure those in power to take action against human rights abuses, to support those who are on the frontlines of gathering information and to also fight back against denial in spite of evidence. In an age of misinformation and disinformation, the fear is that evidence of atrocities, like the Bucha and Uyghur genocides, become distorted from the side of the perpetrator. Seeing Auschwitz reminds us to look deeper into what we’re viewing.
Every day there seems to be a new public controversy, with clear free speech elements, which dominates our public discourse for a day or two. Each one typically leads to a discussion within Index, our professional staff debating not just whether we should make an intervention and what that could look like. But sometimes, more importantly, the team has the intellectual debate about where the lines on the right to freedom of speech fall. What are the rights and responsibilities we all have towards the societies we live in? Where is the line on incitement, on hate speech, on civility?
From Kanye West, to the revoking of TV Rain’s broadcast licence in Latvia, to the death of Jiang Zemin. All had freedom of expression angles, all were complicated, no part of the reality behind the news was clear cut and nuance in the debate was seemingly lost in the maelstrom of the debate.
Personally I struggle with Kanye West being given a platform by anyone; his words incite violence against a minority and there can be little debate that his public statements amount to hate speech. I have spent the majority of my life campaigning against racism and anti-Jewish hate and Mr West, aka Ye, is clearly a racist who espouses views that I will always challenge. And I struggle to be convinced that he has the right to celebrate and justify his racism on every platform available.
However, there are those within the Index family, including some of our founders, who consider (or considered) free speech to be an absolute right - where no limitations on speech could be tolerated. That freedom of expression enables us to shine a light on extremist views and therefore can act as an antidote to them. Intellectually I can understand that approach, I even have huge sympathy with it. Pushing extremist views to the fringes and making them illicit, gives them a mystery and an appeal that they otherwise might not attract. But there has to be a balance, at least in my opinion.
Which brings me back to the right to speak versus the right to be heard. I have the absolute right to write this blog but you have the absolute right not to read it. I have the right to speak, to draw, to argue, but you have the right to ignore me. Because the Universal Declaration of Human Rights gives me the right to have my own views and to be able to share them without fear or favour - but it doesn’t force anyone to have to listen to them. So the onus is on all of us to find the balance between respecting our freedom of expression and protecting and enhancing the public spaces of the societies we live in.